


Find Me

by mimosaeyes



Series: Asterification [3]
Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Bromance, Flying Graysons, Gen, Pre-Slash, Romani, YJ S1E16: Failsafe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-03
Updated: 2011-12-03
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:47:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mimosaeyes/pseuds/mimosaeyes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Failsafe.</p><p>"You just have to pick now to go geeky on me, don't you?"</p><p>"Yeah. Because we're still here. Alive."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Find Me

Mount Justice, precisely 29 minutes past midnight. There's a tangle of sheets scrunched around a raven-haired vigilante curled into a fetal position upon his Batman & Robin bedspread. He seems peaceful enough, despite the sheen of cold sweat and the quick darting motion of his eyes.

' _Everything' now solely comprises his steady, rhythmic breaths, and the smell of just enough chalk dusting his hands. He feeds off the energy of the crowd, compressing their yells and wolf-whistles into the short distance between himself and the open air ahead, the infinite, invisible arcs they will never know of, will never see._

_" _Haley's Circus gives you... the fearless Flying Graysons!"__

_His Maică, reaching out for him to jump into her arms, her eyes locked on his all the while. Come, my little Robin, she encourages him, silently. Come fly with us._

__But then the reinforced titanium slackens and they forget the intangible geometrical shapes they have traced so many times. She fell, they both fell, they —_ _

___His lips quivering now, too, babbling incoherent sentences in a once-native tongue: Maică, nu am putut salva, Taică —_ _ _

He wakes with a start. Instinctively, he brings his knees up to his chest, rocking slowly back and forth, immeasurably small amidst the sea of bed sheets. Robin lets out a low hiss as his tense muscles protest, then mechanically swings his feet over the side to pad silently across the floor. The hallway light is eerie, making the symbol on his Kid Flash pajamas practically glow and crackle.

"Rob?"

Voice still bleary with sleep, Wally shifts under the covers as his room door creaks open. The absurd hours his best friend keeps have trained him to be a light sleeper. Robin moves, quickly now, over to the bed.

_When he peers over the side of the platform, it's not them he sees but his teammates, piled unceremoniously together but seemingly alright. Aqualad with the seriousness wiped clean off his face. Superboy curling his body over Miss Martian protectively. And beside them, KF and Artemis spaced far apart, their fingers just brushing together. But even as he watches, a wind picks up, their bodies turn to ash and race away on the draft._

Wally sits up unnaturally straight and flicks on a bedside light Robin has never stopped teasing him about. "Rob? You okay, dude?"

He's obviously not, what with his eyes resolutely boring holes in the ground. Shakily, the younger boy whispers, "Joseph Stalin said a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths, a statistic."

 _All dead, all because of me. He glares at his hands because they_ haven't _disintegrated._

Belatedly the ginger realizes the stark absence of a certain pair of dark glasses, and subsequently pretends not to notice the stark presence of hot tear tracks running down each cheek.

"Where'd you learn history?" he teases, before stating in his most scientific-slash-professional-slash-intelligent voice, "Although that quotation  _has_ been attributed popularly to Stalin as early as 1958, there is no evidence at this time that it is genuine."

" _Sixteen seconds and counting. Manhunter, take Miss Martian and go. We'll follow as soon as we blow those doors."_

__Then the whole world blows apart; his skin is scorched, every fiber of his being seems to fill with white heat, the Kevlar lining his uniform only accentuating the effect. It isn't made to withstand a rapidly expanding pressure front passing through it at supersonic speeds ranging from 3,000 to 9,000 meters per second. Nothing is._ _

 "You just  _have_  to pick now to go geeky on me, don't you?"

Wally slides off his bed onto the floor, dragging along a patchwork quilt from Aunt Iris. Touching the younger boy's shoulder reassuringly, he replies, "Yeah. Because we're still here. Alive." He nudges Robin's foot, and gets only a sigh in response. Robin's cerulean gaze travels down his friend's very real, Robin-pajama-clad form, searching for nonexistent wounds, imaginary shards of shattered glass, apparitions of angry bruises. Then the blue eyes soften; the tension melts away, dissipating rapidly from his limbs because  _it's true_ , he's checked himself.

Unmoving, he allows Wally to tug him into his makeshift blanket fort and drape some kind of cloth over him, fabric that probably started out rough but is now soft and downy from years of soaking up secret tears. The words have broken some sort of spell, and he sighs recalling his mild catatonia while under it. The images of his dream are fading into the surrounding darkness; the warm yellow emitted by that (lame) bedside lamp (that Wally  _still_ hasn't gotten rid of) keeps them at bay.

"I – I'm sorry, Wals," he mumbles. "Being crazy, paranoid... obsessive... yeah, just —  _crazy._ "

A chuckle from his friend. "'s okay, bro." A pause as Wally pulls him a little closer, so they have their backs together against the side of the bed.

"H-how come...  _I..._ can't be as fearless as they were?" Robin's hair smells of shampoo on his shoulder.

The speedster slows his rapid-fire thoughts to consider this.

"Nobody's ever fearless. They just... find something more important, to hold on to."

"Oh," Robin manages.

"And I know I'm a corn-ball, so... just knee me in the kidney and be  _alright_  already."

A slow grin spreads across the younger boy's face.

"Okay," he consents. 

**Author's Note:**

> Fanart by the lovely joyfulldreams.
> 
> Inspired by lyrics from Boyce Avenue's "Find Me": if ever alone in this world, I know I'll always / find me, here in your arms / where the world just shuts down for a while / blindly, you came to me / finding peace and belief in this smile / find some peace, and believe in this smile
> 
> Originally posted on FF.net. This was my first ever fic in any fandom, and I'm a sentimental softie.


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